At the UN Open Source Conference, I joined a breakout session on funding open source. 

We discussed tensions between current funding models, sustainability, and incentives with maintainers from Python Software Foundation, Processing Foundation, Linux devs, etc

I brought up crypto...and things got interesting... ↴

cultivating sovereignty and stewardship // one must imagine Sisyphus happy // https://fevenm.substack.com // https://x.com/notfeven

Corporate sponsorship often skews priorities. Maintainers shared stories of feeling pressured to prioritize features requested by enterprise sponsors over what might actually be better for the project's long-term health, sustainability, or security.

The incentive misalignment is persistent among projects.

We discussed funding types like:
→ Corporate sponsorship
→ Government grants
→ Civic tech & philanthropy
→ Consumer donations
→ Paid features
→ Crypto

Each model has tradeoffs.

First takeaway:

Sporadic funding = stalled momentum.

Many OSS projects lack consistent financial support, making it hard to plan for long-term stewardship, security, or growth.

I think for them it should be about abstracting crypto as much as possible using tools like @privy  until a point where they don’t realise it’s crypto anymore.
That’s the next step for me @tipdotmd on a mission to make OSS funding frictionless.

i get it :) negative sentiment doesn’t seem to be at an all time high anymore like during the NFT craze

i think we have to approach anti crypto FOSS people with relentless optimism (which isn’t really scalable lol)

ive thought about leveraging crytpo to bring attention to some open source projects i want to do


but i do fear the bad look it might be for some anti-crypto foss folks i guess?


the main thing is, getting distribution at scale is hard